Activity Monitoring

5 minutes 5 Questions

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. It records the API calls made for your AWS account within the AWS Management Console, SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This data helps you monitor changes to AWS resources and evaluate security implications. For example, you can identify unauthorized access to your resources and trace back the source API calls. You can also configure CloudTrail to send logged data to Amazon S3 for storage and later analysis or send real-time notifications via Amazon SNS.

Activity Monitoring in AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail Activity Monitoring: This is a crucial feature that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. It ensures that every activity within your AWS environment is logged and easily auditable.

Importance: Activity Monitoring helps in tracking changes to your AWS resources. It enhances security by enabling visibility into user activity. It helps in troubleshooting operational and security incidents.

Operation: CloudTrail records all the API calls for your account. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the parameters, and the response elements. CloudTrail can also record the API calls from your on-premises resources if you use them to manage AWS services.

Exam Tips: Understanding Activity Monitoring is vital for the AWS Solution Architect examination. Here are a few guide points:
• Distinguish between what AWS CloudTrail does and does not do.
• Understand what kind of information CloudTrail collects.
• Be aware of how long CloudTrail Logs are retained in different types of storage.
• Remember that CloudTrail can be integrated with CloudWatch and S3.

Questions regarding Activity Monitoring are usually scenario-based. You should be able to identify which AWS service would be ideal for monitoring and logging activities. Furthermore, remember that a deep understanding of the functionality and usage scenarios of CloudTrail is often crucial in answering these questions correctly.

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Question 1

A DevOps team needs to review their EC2 instances for any unauthorized access. Which AWS service would best help them monitor and send alerts for suspicious activity?

Amazon ECR Amazon GuardDuty Amazon CloudWatch AWS Lambda

Correct Answer: Amazon GuardDuty

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious or unauthorized behavior to help protect your AWS accounts and workloads. The other services mentioned do not directly focus on threat detection and monitoring for unauthorized access.

Question 2

A company wants to monitor the VPC flow logs in their AWS environment for unusual spikes in network traffic. Which AWS service can be used to analyze VPC flow logs and set alarms?

Amazon Route 53 Amazon VPC Amazon CloudWatch Amazon S3

Correct Answer: Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch can analyze VPC flow logs, and it supports setting alarms based on specific metrics or conditions. This allows you to monitor and be notified of unusual spikes or patterns in network traffic in your VPC.

Question 3

A Solutions Architect needs to audit the usage of AWS services within an organization in order to ensure regulatory compliance. They want to identify non-compliant resources and suggest remediation actions if necessary. Which AWS service would help them achieve this?

AWS Management Console Amazon Connect AWS Config AWS Glue

Correct Answer: AWS Config

AWS Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and helps automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. This can be useful to ensure compliance with regulatory standards and identify non-compliant resources.

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